I was thinking about doing that BBC book meme, but it’s apparently bogus, so I decided to make my own.

When I was a homeschooler trying to convince colleges that I had an education, my family had a helpful book called Reading Lists for College-Bound Students with recommended high school reading lists from over 100 different American colleges and universities. At the front it listed the 100 most frequently recommended books. (Some authors have alternate suggestions, so it’s actually more than 100.)

The College Reading List Meme

The 100(+) books most frequently recommended for high schoolers by American colleges and universities

Bold the books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

Aeschylus – Orestia

Anonymous – Beowulf

Anonymous – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Aristophanes – Lysistrata

Aristotle – Poetics

Augustine, Saint – Confessions

Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice or Emma

Baldwin, James – Go Tell It On the Mountain or Notes of a Native Son

Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot

Bellow, Saul – Seize the Day or Henderson the Rain King

Bible

Brecht, Bertolt – Mother Courage and Her Children

Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre

Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights

Camus, Albert – The Stranger

Carroll, Lewis – Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass

Cather, Willa – My Antonia or Death Comes For the Archbishop

Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote

Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales

Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard or The Three Sisters (I prefer his short stories to his plays, in general)

Chopin, Kate – The Awakening

Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim

Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage

Dante – Inferno

Darwin, Charles – Origin of Species or The Voyage of the Beagle

Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe

Dickens, Charles – Great Expectations

Dostoevsky, Feodor – Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov (I am a terrible Russian major, Notes From Underground was good though)

Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch

Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man

Emerson, Ralph Waldo – “The American Thinker” or “Self-Reliance”

Euripides – Medea or The Bacchae

Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury

Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews

Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby

Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary (could not get into it)

Forster, E.M. – A Passage To India

Franklin, Benjamin – Autobiography

Freud, Sigmund – Civilization and Its Discontents or Dora

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel – One Hundred Years of Solitude

Goethe, Johann von – Faust, Part I

Golding, William – Lord of the Flies

Hamilton, Edith – Mythology

Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the D’Urbervilles or The Return of the Native (I seem to either love Hardy or hate him – loved Return of the Native and Far From the Madding Crowd, but haaaated Mayor of Casterbridge and couldn’t get into Tess)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter (ugh)

Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell To Arms or The Sun Also Rises (double ugh)

Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse or A Room of One’s Own (A Room of One’s Own has been in my TBR pile forever, really need to get to it one of these days)

Wright, Richard – Native Son

So, if I counted right, that’s 36 top choices I’ve read in their entirety, plus 7 alternates and a bunch of partial reads. I’m not gonna get hired as an English professor anytime soon, but not bad. My favorites on the list (in alphabetical order):

It’s probably safe to call Pride and Prejudice my favorite novel. It comes down to Pride and Prejudice vs Middlemarch, but while I consider Middlemarch to be the slightly better novel, I’ve read P&P a lot more times. And watched the BBC adaptation a lot more times, as well as most of the other film adaptations, including the modern AU, the weird black & white one with the 1840s fashion and the totally OOC Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and the Bollywood version.

I get that it’s a totally predictable and boring choice for favorite book, but it really is just that good. And I don’t just mean the romance, although the romance is obviously wonderful. Jane Austen was freaking hilarious and an extremely astute observer of life, so even if you don’t like romance in general, you should give this book a try for the satire.

Middlemarch gets my vote for the best English language novel ever written, and possibly my favorite as well. It comes down to Middlemarch vs Pride and Prejudice and I can never choose. Middlemarch is longer and more challenging than Pride and Prejudice, so I haven’t read it as many times, but although not openly satirical or as sharp-tongued as Austen, Eliot shares both Austen’s wit and her deep and nuanced understanding of the foibles of human nature. At the same time, Eliot’s novel is much further-reaching than Austen’s. Middlemarch is subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life” and unlike Austen, who confines her pen largely to provincial gentry and their romantic and financial entanglements, Eliot lays out the whole life of a small English town in the 1830s, from gentry to vagrants and everyone in between. The psychological realism she achieved is remarkable, especially considering the field of psychology barely existed at the time the book was published, and despite the very different world her characters inhabit, you will recognize them as well as if they were your next-door neighbors (indeed, it’s quite possible that some of them are), and grow to care deeply about them.

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